Author: Jason Goroncy

When ten commandments is ‘too many’ …

My son Samuel (2) is convinced that ten commandments is ‘too many’. (He doesn’t have a particularly developed doctrine of divine wisdom, and we haven’t done Leviticus yet, so I’m cutting him some slack!) And while he’s yet to learn how to spell his own surname properly, he’s probably onto something here, especially if Jesus is to be our guide on such matters (so Luke 10.27 and parallels). Anyway, Samuel has picked out his favourite the most important four:

4 commandments

Not a bad list. I tried to convince him about the one that says something about tidying up your room, but he wasn’t buying it. Still, I was pleased to see that #5 made the cut … for now.

Lipsey’s Dag Hammarskjöld: A Life – 3

Lipsey - Hammarskjold. A LifeIt is true that Dag Hammarskjöld was given an astonishing apprenticeship in life and early career in terms of both formal education and other opportunities through which he would gain valuable perspectives on the inner workings of international diplomacy. It was a start which prepared him well for the vocation in which he would eventually find his feet. But among the many things that made him extraordinary as a world leader was an energy turned towards things more elusive. His deep and hope-filled capacity to say ‘Yes’ to humanity (he was not naïve; the Congo crisis birthed in him a conviction that ‘there are really evil persons – evil right through – only evil’, p. 510), and his ‘moral stature and incorruptible justice, his integrity and whole-hearted commitment, and his never-failing sense of responsibility vis-à-vis the task’ (p. 51) – to recall a description provided by Hammarskjöld’s governmental colleague and later loyal friend Henrik Klackenberg (Hammarskjöld served as a member of the Swedish cabinet in the early 1950s) – grew not only out of the soil provided by a mother with a deep social conscience and spirituality, but also, as Roger Lipsey notes, by a ‘crushingly honest exploration of what it is to live; to have mind, heart, and body; to be thrown into this world; to decipher experience; to carry burdens and face weaknesses a little wisely; to find something approaching inner peace; to glimpse a larger pattern, and somehow serve the good’ (p. 53).

Anyone familiar with Markings could not but agree that this description is indicative of its author’s quest to live an examined life – ‘we are witnessing a gifted soul deeply engaged in its own education’ (p. 59) – a quest which more than any other single factor made Hammarskjöld lead out of a tributary that too few dare approach, but which Lipsey, appropriately, makes much of throughout this biography. As Hammarskjöld would write in Markings:

The road to self-knowledge does not pass through faith. But only through the insight we gain by pursuing the fleeting light in the depth of our being do we reach the point where we can grasp what faith is. How many have been driven into our darkness by empty talk about faith as something to be rationally comprehended, something ‘true’.

HammarskjöldIt is little wonder therefore that one of the most recurring themes in Lipsey’s study is loneliness, an indispensable burden (it seems) of a person given to take seriously the long wandering for home that the hungry soul risks, and of a leader given to undertake with unflinching gravity the risky service of humanity – the lonely burden of true leadership – and that while carrying the conviction that ‘the only elevation possible to man lies in the depths of humiliation’ (Hammarskjöld, as cited on p. 502). Little wonder too that while not lacking in resources, Lipsey’s Hammarskjöld is ‘a tormented soul’ (p. 65).

He was not, however, without wonderful friends – his brother, Bo and Greta Beskow, W. H. Auden and John Steinbeck among them. Indeed, one of the persistent refrains throughout Lipsey’s account of Hammarskjöld’s life concerns the abiding value of true friends, particularly at those times when (such as in the midst of the Suez and Congo crises) ‘one’, in Hammarskjöld’s words, ‘happens to be standing in the middle of crossroads along which an abnormally high level of political traffic is pressing’ (p. 488), when hope is clouded in and lost to weariness, and when the music of reconciliation is drowned out by the Machiavellian drums of fear and mistrust. His friends, it seems, provided a sanctuary wherein his humour was most expressive, and where his kindness could be enjoyed without fear of suspicion. They also helped him to keep things in perspective – to ‘remember that there is more to reality than [the] chaos, menace, and slander’ (p. 492) which characterised so much of his day-to-day work as a political celibate (although he was not, by his own admission, a political virgin). As with prayer, his friends too were a gift from the God of hope, the One for whom chaos and human recalcitrance finally represent no obstacle to love reaching its goal – however long it may take, and however hard the arc of history must bend. His relationship with his friends represents too where the road to self-knowledge could be traversed, and where the repeatable journey from death to life passes though the experience of unworthiness, disappointment and incapability into the freedom of inexplicable relief and surprise, and even joy.

some thursday drop-offs

Drop-off-AreaIt’s been a while since I shared some link love. Let me remedy that:

Alfonse Borysewicz on The Beekeeper Paintings

HiveAlfonse Borysewicz, a dear friend, is no stranger to this blog. I have been a fan of his work for some years now, and Alfonse has also kindly penned the Foreword to a book that I’ve edited – Tikkun Olam – To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts (forthcoming from Pickwick Publications). There is a short video here of Alfonse speaking about his Beekeeper Paintings, currently on show at Space 38|39 in NYC. In his own words:

For too long I have felt like a stranger or a man on the moon with my obsession of religious imagery. All around me I see an abandonment of overt religious imagery (especially by a contemporary somewhat abstract hand) yet I not only cling to painting more ‘religious’ imagery but have sought to exhibit them in churches where even there it seems to lack an apparent audience. What authenticates this work, and keeps me faithful to it, especially in my mature years, is that ‘undertow of mystery’ in the painting itself. In that sense, the man on the moon estrangement has been transformed to the nurturing Bee Keeper. Several years ago I came across a poem by Robert Frost which seemed to encapsulate the issues and emotions of my own artistic sojourn. The White-Tailed Hornet Lives in a Balloon moves from a simple observation of a hornet in a barn to a contemplation of our humanity to divinity. In the same way my installation of six paintings begins with a stare upwards to the hornets hive and with eye moving left and right then center to the Christ experience and my/our response to it. The poetic becomes engaged with the religious. It is my own altarpiece in paint to ponder both the wonder and mystery of it all; especially for an audience of one.

Encountered by One who has established kinship with us in time: celebrating Søren Kierkegaard

KierkegaardAware that today marks the 200th anniversary of the Danish philosopher/theologian Søren Kierkegaard, I invited a dear friend and Kierkegaard scholar Andrew Torrance (whose doctoral work is on Kierkegaard and Barth) to pen a few thoughts on the birthday boy and his work. I am very grateful to Andrew for taking up the invitation with these words:

It is not easy to write a short post on the 200th anniversary of such a multifaceted thinker as Søren Kierkegaard. But Kierkegaard himself provides us with a pointer for such a task. In his spiritual autobiography, The Point of View, he notes that his ‘whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian’ (23). Yet his perspective on the Christian existence is also not narrow in focus. So how should one proceed from here? At this point, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus provides us with further focus when he considers what is decisive about the Christian faith. Towards the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript (where he elaborates on his work, Philosophical Fragments), Climacus makes it clear that there is no Christian faith without the eternal God entering into time to deliver persons into a relationship with God. The decisively Christian rests wholly upon the real God personally encountering individuals in history and delivering them from their self-enclosed existences into a new life of relationship with God. This new life is constituted by an outward relationship mediated by the one who, precisely by being the eternal truth, constitutes the only way to that truth.

kierkegaard 2So, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (which Kierkegaard describes as the “turning point” in his entire authorship), Climacus asserts that it is the real person of God, rather than a mere human idea of God, that lies at the heart of the Christian faith. For Kierkegaard himself, this person is the person of Jesus Christ, the God-human. What this means is that Christians are defined by a relationship with the truth “who” cannot become a possession of the immanent human mind; ‘God cannot be an object for man, since God is subject’ (Journals and Papers, 2:1349). Yet while this truth cannot become an object of human thought, it can and does transform human thought. For Kierkegaard, becoming a Christian involves a transformative journey that is grounded in an active relationship with the God who is present with us and encounters us in Jesus Christ. As such, at the basis of Kierkegaard’s Christian vision is not an existentialist view of human becoming, nor an attack on the nominal Christianity of Danish Christendom, rather it is a commitment to the Gospel, to the person of Jesus Christ.

Accordingly, as Kierkegaard engaged with the question of becoming a Christian, he was acutely aware that he was without authority in this task. He did not for a moment believe that it was within his power to present the world with the truth of revelation, nor did he believe that he could explain how exactly persons are awakened to the truth of revelation. Why? Because any human idea that he put forward could not communicate the truth of who God is; it could not take the place of the divine subject. Kierkegaard’s words could never mediate the Christian truth and could never explain the mystery of God’s grace. Consequently, his proclamation was completely at the mercy of God who encounters us in Jesus Christ. He could only turn to the High Priest whose incarnation does not simply reveal a unity between the God and humanity but creates this unity. As another of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Anti-Climacus writes, ‘That the human race is supposed to be in kinship with God is ancient paganism; but that an individual human being is God is Christianity, and this particular human being is the God-man.’ (Practice in Christianity, 82).

With this view, Kierkegaard challenged the overpowering belief that we are able to talk about God without God, reducing God to the realm of finite human understanding and language – a move that has repeatedly enabled the idea of God to become a plaything to be employed for our own human agendas. Kierkegaard saw this move as one that was enabled by the handholding “Christianity” had taken up with the variety of idealisms, Romanticisms, and post-enlightenment humanisms that exalt the powers of immanent human reason.

The problem with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the outward relationship with God, realised in and through Jesus Christ, is that it entailed an inescapable uncertainty. When the truth is located beyond human subjectivity, in a transcendent other, the Christian cannot look to her own immanent powers of comprehension for security. In fear and trembling, she is required to trust that her faith is not simply a product of her own belief-forming imagination but is actually awakened by the reality of Jesus Christ. Paradoxically, the Christian is called to believe that she cannot truly believe without the one in whom she believes.

Kierkegaard 1Under these circumstances, Kierkegaard realised that, speculatively, he could not get beyond the possibility that his Christian life was a purely poetic existence, an existence created by his own imagination. So, to the question of whether or not he himself was a Christian, he responds,

My answer would be: I trust to God that I am a Christian; I believe that out of grace he will accept me as a Christian… The question of whether I am a Christian (and thus for every individual, whether he is a Christian) is entirely a God-relationship. (Point of View, 135)

Although, for Kierkegaard, the Christian faith entails devotion to a reality who cannot be commandeered by the human mind, this did not mean that his theology undermined the importance of human practice. Also, it did not mean that his theology called for a blind fideism. His theology called for Christian realism that did not repose in an inward ability to embrace uncertainty but turns to the reality of God who encounters us in history, the God who actively awakens us, upbuilds us and governs us in our faith. He encouraged Christians to struggle as witnesses to God in the world, with the understanding that God upholds them in their struggles, working behind them and with them. He summoned Christians to lead prayerful lives, lives in which they learned to talk about their struggles with God. He told Christians to strive to follow Christ, to be obedient, with the knowledge that when they fall short, Christ is not only their prototype but also their redeemer. He sought to foster an attitude of earnest repentance, with which Christians continually turn to God for renewal – for example, by coming to encounter God in the eucharist (in the presence of Christ). And he proclaimed these things by continually turning to the witness of Scripture, to the words through which God speaks to the world.

Ultimately, for Kierkegaard, it is not primarily our beliefs and practices that make us Christian. Again, if we find that we have become Christian it is because we are conscious of having been encountered by the God-human, Jesus Christ and have been drawn into communion with the one who, inconceivably, has established kinship with us in time.

Commemorating 60 years since Dag Hammarskjöld took office as Secretary-General

A few weeks ago, the UN held an event to commemorate 60 years since Dag Hammarskjöld took office as Secretary-General. The event was opened by the current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and included a presentation by Roger Lipsey, author of Hammarskjöld: A Life. The event also included a debate between Brian Urquhart (who was one of Hammarskjöld’s main advisors in his role as Secretary-General), Andrew Gilmour (who serves as the Director of the Political, Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Human Rights Unit with the Executive Office of the Secretary-General), and Annika Söder (who is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation). I thought that perhaps those few readers who have been interested in my recent posts on Hammarskjöld might appreciate watching some of the video from that event. Hammarskjöld’s address begins at around the 20 minute mark.

April stations …

George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of CommunityReading:

Listening:

Watching:

Lipsey’s Dag Hammarskjöld: A Life – 2

Lipsey - Hammarskjold. A LifeJim Gordon’s recent post asks some good questions about the nature of leadership. He insightfully compares two figures – Steve Jobs and Dag Hammarskjöld – and asks which of these represents the brand of leadership most commensurate with the ministry of the viva vox dei of which the church is a creature. While words like ‘perseverance’, ‘attractive’, ‘impressive’, ‘innovative’ and ‘successful’ dominate airport bookshops’ literature on the subject of leadership, and go some way to describing Jobs’ own unique set of giftings, what is less apparent is a lexicon required to describe the manner of leadership modelled by Hammarskjöld, where the grammar of ‘servanthood’ and ‘trust’ and ‘relationships’ proves to be both indispensable and to be ends in themselves, and where the whole is motivated by a particular vision of reconciliatory being at the centre of all reality, the patient Thou apart from whom life makes no sense, and hope in the possibilities of human communities in which the many (and not the few) flourish is kept alive.

I am thus far only about half way through Lipsey’s gentle, spiritual and stimulating biography on Hammarskjöld, but already there has been hardly a page in which Jim’s assessment of the Swedish diplomat and economist is not confirmed, and that perhaps in no chapter more so than that which attends to tensions in late 1957 when the Maoist Chinese announced that they had sentenced to prison eleven American airmen, plus two CIA agents, shot down near the Korean border. The details of the so-called ‘Peking negotiation’ are carefully retold in Chapter 10 of Lispey’s book, ‘Un Chinois aux Yeux Bleus’ (pp. 210–36), and do not need to be rehashed here except to say, with some understatement, that the level of trust and understanding between the USA and mainland China was at sometime of a low ebb in the aftermath of the Korean War, the UN was still in many ways writing its own job description (something which was among Hammarskjöld’s greatest and most lasting contributions as Secretary General), and China was ardent about finding a seat as a UN member nation. What strikes me most about Hammarskjöld’s leadership in this environment fraught with cultural and political sensitivities (as was the case at other times too such as the tumultuous period of 1956-57 in the Middle East, a region ‘churning with anger and mistrust, conspiracy and threat, outside pressures and a partially concealed but grim arms race’ (p. 237)) was the risky and vulnerable shape of his commitment to practical reconciliation, his refusal to sacrifice deeply help principles on the altar of short-term political point scoring, his personal dedication to the possibility of a certain vision of the future in which international relations might be characterised not by a life-defeating defensiveness and abstraction but by patient and deeply personal trust and search for mutual understanding which for Hammarskjöld, at this particularly volatile point in twentieth century history, meant wading gently through a political, legal, historical and organisational morass. It was, to be sure, an act of careful diplomacy – and the favourable outcome was, in many ways, a triumph of such – but if by that we mean something like an act of a clever stuntman, we will have completely missed an astonishing achievement of an extraordinarily hopeful human being among us. To recall words he spoke in May 1955 at a press conference on nuclear disarmament, and which in many ways characterise his own leadership: ‘There have been no precedents or experiences which entitle us not to try again’.

That the church too is burdened with passionately-defended lines of demarcation that sponsor a silence towards and lies about those who hold to different positions on all manner of subjects, and with a widespread absence of porosity – and so a desire to grow with and vis-à-vis the other – means that she too is desperately in need of the kind of leadership that Hammarskjöld embodies.

‘The Wedding Feast at Cana in Galilee’: a sermon by the Rev Dr Thomas Fortheringhame

norwich-canaI have been at pains, of late, to discover a more erudite and faithful exposition on chapter 2 of St John’s Gospel – on the wedding at Cana – than that preached by the Rev. Dr Thomas Fortheringhame, who served as minister of the parish church of St. Peter’s which stands at one end of a sandy bay on the west coast of Orkney. Of course, the current House of the Lord there is a small square stone utilitarian structure built in the year 1826 by the freely-given labour of all the parishioners; women are said to have carried the stones from the quarry three miles away on their backs, a slow, holy, winter-long procession. But there were churches there before the present church was erected. The inscribed tombs in the churchyard go back to the seventeenth century, and there are older anonymous stones.

The good reverend doctor was the author of two volumes of sermons published in Edinburgh, not half a mile from The Mound. He complained in a written account of the parish that ‘the Kirk roof is full of leakings and dribblings in the winter time, and of draughts at all seasons of the year, whereby the parishioners are like to catch their death of cold, and often my discourses are broken by reason of their hoastings and coughings. The masonry is much delapidated’. It was soon after this that plans were drawn up by the laird for the building of the present church on the same site. But there were other churches there even before Dr Fortheringhame’s wet and draughty edifice. Among the clustering tombstones is a piece of a wall with a weathered hole in it that looks as though it might have been an arched window, and slightly to one side an abrupt squat arrangement of dressed stones that suggests an altar. The Rev. Dr Fortheringhame – O what a gentleman of such magnificent faith! – says curtly, ‘There is in the vicinity of the Kirk remnants of a popish chapel, where the ignorant yet resort in time of sickness and dearth to leave offerings, in the vain hope that such superstition will alleviate their sufferings; the which Romish embers I have exerted myself to stamp out with all severity during the period of my ministry’. Anyway, without further ado, I commend to your learning and most earnest meditation Dr Fortheringhame’s sermon, dated August 1788, on the wedding feast at Cana in Galilee:

‘Brethren, some of you might be thinking that the piece of gospel I read out just this minute anent the Lord Christ’s turning of water into wine at Cana of Galilee is divine permission to you to make drunken beasts of yourselves at every wedding that takes place within the bounds of this parish this coming winter; ay, and not only at every wedding but at every christening forby and every funeral and harvest supper. It is the devil of hell that has put such a thought into your minds. It never says in holy writ that any wedding guest was drunk at Cana of Galilee.

‘Magnus Learmonth, you in the second pew from the back, at the wedding you made for your third lass Deborah at Skolness at the back end of Lammas, all the guests lay at the ale-kirn like piglets about the teats of a sow till morning, to the neglect even of dancing; and two women in this same district came to themselves next morning in the ditch of Graygyres. Bella Simison, you do well to hang your head there at the back of the Kirk – it argues a small peck of grace. Andrina of Breck, you were the other defaulter – don’t look at me like that, woman! – you have a brazen outstaring impudence commensurate with your debauchery. Well I know you and your runnings back and fore between Breck and the alehouse with your bit flask under your shawl. Things are told privily into my lug.

‘What this text argues, brethren, is that the host at the wedding, the bridegroom’s good-father, was a careful and a prudent man with his bawbees. No doubt this provident man said to himself the day the marriage bids were sent about the countryside with a hired horseman, “If I order too few pigs of drink, they’ll say I keep the purse-strings drawn over tight, and if I order too muckle they’ll say I’m a spendthrift. And so I find myself between devil and deep. What is the right quantity of drink for a celebration such as this?” … Being a prudent man, I say, he ordered too few pigs of drink (only it wasn’t pigs of usquebaugh, whisky, in that foreign place, nor yet ale; it was jars of wine). The which when the Lord came he corrected, he set to right, as he will beyond a doubt set to right all our exaggerations and our deficiencies, since only he kens what is stinted and what is overblown in the nature of every man born. He adds and he takes from. The stringent economy of the host drew no rebuke from him. He accomplished the miracle. Then there was dancing, then there was fiddling, then no doubt near midnight bride and groom were carried into the ben room with roughness and sly jokes and a fiddle and five lanterns.

St Peters Orkney‘Nor was this the end of meat and drink as far as the Lord was concerned. You ken all about the multiplication of the five bannocks and the two cod-fish, concerning which I preached to you for an hour and more last Sabbath. There came a night at the supper-board when he suddenly took an oat-cake and broke it and raised his jug of drink and leaned across and said to them who were no doubt wanting to fill their bellies without any palaver, “This is my body,” he said, and then, “This is my blood” – a most strange and mystifying comparison indeed, that the papists would have us believe to be a literal and real and wholly breath-taking change of substance effected by a form of words. Whatever it means, brethren – and our General Assembly has not and doubtless will not bind you to any infallible conclusions as to the significance of these utterances – whatever it means, it teaches us a terrible reverence for the things we put in our mouths to nourish us, whether it is the laird’s grouse and claret or the limpets that Sam of the Shore eats with cold water out of the well in the lean days of March.

‘You will not go home, therefore, and hog down your brose like swine in a sty or like cuddies at a trough. The common things you put in your mouths are holy mysteries indeed, beyond the taste and the texture. Therefore, brethren, with reverence you will make them a part of your body and your life.

‘Prudence, my brethren, a proper proportioning of our goods, estimation, forethought – so much to the King, so much to the laird, so much to the Kirk, so much for the maintainance [sic] of ourselves and them that belong to us, so much to the poor – that is doubtless the meaning of this text; and for the things we lack, that we should ask the Lord to supply them, and so rest content in our estate.

‘John Sweynson, I observe that you bought a new shawl to your wife’s head at the Kirkwall Market, with what looks to be silken lacing round the edge of it, a thing of vanity, and new black lace gloves to her hands. She will not darken this kirk door again, no nor you either, with these Babylonish things on her body.

‘Samuel Firth, of the operations of your farm, Dale in the district of Kirkbister, naturally I ken nothing, nor does it concern me. But you have seven black cows on the hill if you have one, and fifty sheep forby, and a hundred geese. Is it a proper and a godly thing, think you, that your three small bairns sit in the front pew there under the precentor blue and channering with the cold, they having no right sarks to their backs nor boots to their feet? Have a care of this, look to it, as you call yourself a Christian. Amen.

‘Concluding, I have two announcements to make. John Omand, on account of the bastard child he fathered on Maria Riddoch at Michelmas, appeared before the Kirk session on Wednesday and being duly constrained answered Yea to the accusation, wherefore he will suffer public rebuke three sequent Sabbaths in this Kirk on the stool of penitence, beginning next Sabbath.

‘I hear that the French brig Merle, Monsieur Claude Devereux, master, discharged some cargo at the Bay of Ostray in the darkness of Friday night. The gentlemen of the excise were at Kirkwall, playing at cartes. Will you, therefore, James Drever, deliver as usual a keg of best brandy at the Manse tomorrow morning, when Mistress Skea my serving woman will see that you are recompensed for your pains’.

[Note: The ‘sermon’ appears in George Mackay Brown’s delightful book, A Time to Keep: And Other Stories.]

Deep Blue Kids Bible: A commendation

Deep Blue Kids BibleSome time ago here at PCaL, I mentioned my quest for a suitable children’s bible. As many parents know, it’s a tough gig to find a rightly-pitched kids bible and so I was most grateful for those readers who weighed in with some excellent suggestions and guidelines. I am also very grateful to Lil Copan at Abingdon Press who read of this father’s plight and who very kindly took it upon herself to send me a gratis copy (i.e., with no strings attached) of the Deep Blue Kids Bible. It has proved to be a fantastic choice for us. The translation (the Common English Bible) is reliable (and it handles the vexed Galatians 2.20 fantastically!), fresh and accessible, and its presentation is aesthetically attractive with helpful introductions to books, practical (and not too distracting) in-text notes, a good little dictionary for those tricky words (like ‘cistern’ and ‘nard’ and ‘ordinance’ and ‘winnow’), some short devotions, and some legible maps. Most importantly, my (now) seven-year-old loves reading it. So if you’re looking for a kid’s bible, then I reckon that the Deep Blue Kids Bible is definitely worth your consideration.

On the doom of Sabbath breakers

Sabbath Breakers, 1671An oft-recalled feature of nineteenth-century life in Scotland was reverence for the Lord’s Day. This, of course, in itself, was no new phenomenon. It had long been part of Scottish (and indeed British) Christianity. Nor was it either particularly distinctly Presbyterian, or even Protestant. But this reverence took on new passion and legal seriousness in Victorian society. And the unearthing and recalling of such stories – in their various incarnations and evolutions – makes teaching church history a heap of fun. Consider, for example, the horrifying testimony of Robert Wallace (who had been minister of two Edinburgh parishes, professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University, editor of The Scotsman, and Member of Parliament) from his Life and Last Leaves:

It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling which was created in my mind by the weekly recurrence of our Sabbatic observances. All of a sudden everything that I had been doing last week had become wicked. Latin, Greek, Mathematics, were now wicked; so were marbles, ‘tig’, and races; so were walking, except to church, laughing, singing, except psalms, playing the flute, ‘fiddle’, or any instrument of music, reading newspapers (specially wicked), or anything except the Bible and ‘good’ books. There was scarcely anything that was safe to do from our rising in the morning until our going to bed at night, except reading the Bible, singing psalms, saying or joining in prayers, hearing sermons preached in church or at home. Breakfast, dinner and tea were permitted, because they were necessary to the execution of the sabbath programme; but even during these meals we were not to speak our own words or think our own thoughts. To me the day was a terror, it was so difficult to keep it perfectly; and I knew the doom of sabbath-breakers … On Sundays we were usually engaged for fifteen hours in round numbers, directly or indirectly, connected with the special avocations of the day. Of these, fully seven were devoted to exercises of Biblical worship, including the reading of ‘good’ books, tracts, sermons, and other literature having a Biblical reference; three hours and a half to conversation on the sermons, services, and other religious topics; two hours and a half to preparations for worship, dressing and changing our dress, and walking to and from church; and two hours to meals. I am distributing the conversation, of course, over the journeying and the meals, and allowing each its strict quota.

And we might add further examples: of using only one beater instead of two; of only washing the face, of the fact that the Free Presbyterian website doesn’t operate on the Sabbath, etc. Or that delightful story recalled by George Mackay Brown, in Letters from Hamnavoe, about John Louttit, Kirk Officer of the Secession Church and ‘Sabbath Breaker’:

Last week we followed the Rev Peter Learmonth through Stromness, to find out the number of ale houses along the street in the year 1839. He was somewhat shocked and shaken to discover that there were 38.

This week, we will take a sideways glance at another ecclesiastic figure from the early nineteenth century. There he stands, John Louttit, Kirk Officer of the Secession Church, appointed 22nd March 1814, with a harpoon in one hand and the big Kirk bible under his other arm.

The Kirk Session had given long and anxious consideration to the appointment of its first Kirk officer. They debated the matter for six months and more. He must above all be a pious and good-living man. The election fell upon John Louttit. His salary was to be one guinea a year, plus threepence at every baptism.

For more than eight years we must assume that John Louttit performed his office faithfully and well: carrying up the bible to the pulpit on the Sabbath, keeping the new building above the Plainstones swept and garnished, touching his forelock to the elders in the kirk door.

Then, suddenly, a dreadful thing happened. On 15th October 1822, John Louttit was charged with Sabbath profanation. It was as if a thunderbolt had fallen into the sheepfold.

What had happened, it seems, was that early one Sunday morning John Louttit was lighting his blink of fire in his house at the pier (and it was a terrible job sometimes to get those red peats from the side of Brinkie’s Brae to take light) when he heard folk running along the street, and the sound of boats being pushed down the nousts. ‘Tutcut,’ said John Louttit. He made his breakfast, a poor meal of bread and buttermilk. (You could hardly live like a king on a guinea a year.)

More young men ran past his window. Oars splashed in the harbour. The women – who should have been putting on their best grey shawls for the morning service – were clucking like hens in every door. John Louttit heard the word ‘whales’. That was the cause of all the excitement. There was a school of whales somewhere in the west. The pagans of Stromness were setting forth – Sabbath or no – for the great round-up and slaughter.

John Louttit, putting on his stiff white collar, debated the matter seriously. He was one of the best whale hunters in Orkney. Nothing delighted him more than to yell and clash metal behind a blundering panic-stricken herd; until at last, in blind panic, they hurled themselves to death on the beach at Warbeth or Billia-Croo. Then it was time for the knives and the barrels. John Louttit saw in his mind’s eye, with great vividness, the red whale steaks. Well salted, a man could live off them all winter. He could sit up late, over a yarn and a dram, by the light of a tallow candle that came out of the whale also.

Sabbath profanation was a serious matter. On the other hand, a man was permitted on such a day to do ‘works of necessity and mercy’. Winter was coming on and John Louttit’s cupboard was not overstocked. A guinea a year was not a princely salary … John Louttit removed his stiff, high, white collar. He took the sharp flensing knife from the cupboard. He put on his oldest moleskin trousers; they were likely to be well spattered with blood before sundown. John Louttit took down the oars from the rafters. He went gravely down the steps to his dinghy.

The minister had to carry the bible up to the pulpit himself that Sabbath. A week after the original charge, John Louttit made a second appearance before the Session. It is recorded that, at the meeting of 22nd October, ‘he did not express that sense of the evil of such a notorious profanation of the Lord’s day as was wished or expected. It was agreed that he should be rebuked before the congregation on Saturday first.’

That is the one brief tantalising glimpse that we have of John Louttit. There is no end to the story. We have no idea whether he was sacked in disgrace, or reinstated; if so, perhaps he had to give all his whale meat and tallow to the poor, and go on living piously and poorly on his salary of fourpence a week.

Now it is all very well for us ‘moderns’, for whom Sunday has all-too-often come to be little different from other days of the week, to respond to such Sabbatarianism with a polite smile, but it is worth asking ourselves whether an institution like the Evangelical Sabbath could have persisted so long as it did if it were not at least partially successful in meeting the religious and other needs of God’s people during the late nineteenth century.

Apologies

Apologies to those who receive this blog’s posts via the email subscription and who inadvertently received an unbaked, or at least half-baked, version of the previous post. It was typed up on the WordPress app (as was this apology) while I was both horizontal and half asleep and I had meant to save the post as a draft and work on it sometime after the birds announced the new day.

I understand that such sloppiness indicates neither the end of the world nor a sign of such.

On the hunt for an old(ish) KJV Bible

A brother of mine, whom we shall call Robert, for that is his name, is on the hunt for a Bible. Not just any Bible, mind you, but a specific Bible, or at least a specific edition of the Bible, and that even older than the ones produced by Mr Murdoch. He is desperate to locate a 1885 edition of the King James Bible, the precise title and publishing details of which are:

The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and the New Testaments: translated out of The Original Tongues, and with the Former Translations Diligently Compared and Revised (New York: American Bible Society, Instituted in the year MDCCCXVI, 1885)

The edition sought has a page layout like this:

KJV 2

Why is he looking for a copy? He is just about to complete three months sabbatical leave during which he has been engaged with creating a digitised version of the Cook Islands Maori Bible. It is a journey he has been taking with the Uniting Bible Societies (South Pacific/NZ/Australia) and Cook Islands Christian Church in Rarotonga.

Over the past year, volunteers from NZ, Australia and Rarotonga have been manually typing the text into a Word document in preparation for transfer to the programme Paratext, and subsequent editing etc. The Cook Islands ‘Hard Copy Bible’ has reference columns inclusive. Robert has identified the KJV edition mentioned above as that which was used by the translators in producing the original Cook Islands Maori Bible and believes that availing himself of the reference information in that edition is now vital in taking his project forward. So if anyone can assist Robert in locating a copy of the KJV in question, he would be most delighted to hear from you. You can leave a comment below or email Robert directly.

On the glory of our Anzac heroes

Roll of honour

Regular readers here at PCaL may have noticed (from the sidebar) that I’ve been reading a fair bit of stuff lately from the Orkney writer George Mackay Brown. Indeed, Brown’s work was the focus of my recent sabbatical project (to be continued) wherein I have been particularly interested in Brown’s presentation of the notion of time. But more on that later.

Brown’s third novel, Time in a Red Coat, is an extraordinary tale of a somewhat Melchizedekian heroine who travels through time in order to bring healing to a history and race marked by tragedy, mistrust and violence, and by the sheer absence of an imagination of a world unmarked by such.

Along the way, I was struck by these words, and was again reminded of the great pagan charade that Antipodeans know as ‘Anzac Day‘ (celebrated each year on 25 April, a day marked to remember the dishonesty of worldly politics, the brutality of empire, and by the fact that many ministers serving in the Antipodes are seduced every April by a temptation to place their salvation on the line):

‘If a knight was brought into the courtyard mortally wounded, words like “heroism” and “glory” and “fame” were invoked to cover the ugliness – and beautiful words were carved on his tomb stone’. (pp. 36–37)

Coconut Red Lentil Soup

Coconut Red Lentil SoupThis recipe, modified ever-so-slightly from one shared by Heidi Swanson, was a real hit at our place last week, and I wanted to share the love.

Stuff to source

1 cup/200g yellow split peas
1 cup/200g red split lentils (masoor dal)
7 cups/1.6 liters water
1 medium carrot, diced into 1 cm bits
2 tablespoons fresh peeled and minced ginger
2 tablespoons curry powder
2 tablespoons butter or ghee
8 green onions (scallions), thinly sliced
1 green chilli, finely chopped
1/3 cup/45g raisins
1/3 cup/80 ml tomato paste
1 can coconut milk (I used lite)
2 teaspoons fine grain sea salt
one handful coriander, chopped
cooked brown (or white) rice

Stuff to do with it

Give the split peas and lentils a good rinse – until they no longer put off murky water. Place them in an extra-large soup pot, cover with the water, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and add the carrot and 1/4 of the ginger. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes, or until the split peas are soft.

In the meantime, in a small dry skillet or saucepan over low heat, toast the curry powder until it is quite fragrant. Be careful though, you don’t want to burn the curry powder, just toast it. Set aside. Place the butter in a pan over medium heat, add half of the green onions, the remaining ginger, the green chilli (optional) and raisins. Sauté for two minutes stirring constantly, then add the tomato paste and sauté for another minute or two more.

Add the toasted curry powder to the tomato paste mixture, mix well, and then add this to the simmering soup along with the coconut milk and salt. Simmer, uncovered, for 20 minutes or so. The texture should thicken up, but you can play around with the consistency if you like by adding more water, a bit at a time, if you like. Or simmer longer for a thicker consistency.

Serve over a small amount (about a handful) of cooked brown (or white) rice, and garnish with a generous sprinkling of fresh coriander and the remaining green onions.

Serves 6.

Lipsey’s Dag Hammarskjöld: A Life – 1

Lipsey - Hammarskjold. A LifeI anticipate that it’s going to be a read as slow as it is formative. I recently began working my way through Roger Lipsey’s attentive and long-overdue biography on the remarkable Swedish diplomat and economist Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld served as the second secretary-general of the United Nations (1953–61). He was, as Rowan Williams has observed, ‘one of the most significant moral influences in international politics in the decades immediately after the war’ and who almost single-handedly shaped the ‘vision for international co-operation and crisis management that we struggle to realise and, however reluctantly, take for granted across a great deal of the globe’. For better or ill, the international community today lives with Hammarskjöld’s inheritance. In a review of Lipsey’s book (published in the recently resurrected Cambridge Humanities Review), Williams properly reminds us that

If we largely assume that the United Nations, imperfect as it is, is the only viable forum for brokering international conventions and agreeing on responses to serious crises, it is Hammarskjöld we have to thank for this. And if we also feel intense frustration at the ineffectiveness of the UN as an active peacekeeping force, its failure to offer protection to those most at risk or to exert sanctions against tyrants, this book will help us understand the roots of this, both in Hammarskjöld’s own scrupulous attempts to prevent the UN becoming an intervening power in its own right and in the consistent refusal of major powers to collaborate on sustainable protocols about this and their blinkered loyalty to ‘bloc’ interests. If you want to know why the UN can’t and won’t sort out the nightmare of Syria, many of the answers lie here.

Hammarskjöld was a public figure dedicated to a life of serving the world through the fostering of imagination and policies that serve the interests of peace and reconciliation and hope in a world whose very structures so often pull in a counter direction. He was also a figure who carried an unwavering conviction that true service to the world means descending into the world to be of service, however humble, on terms that worldly people value.

He was one too who attended to the deep things of the spirit. His only book, Vägmärken (Markings), which was published posthumously in 1963, is a collection of his diary reflections from 1925 (when he was 20 years old) until his death (in suspicious circumstances) in 1961. More importantly, it is an astonishing testimony to what nourished him internally. Lipsey describes this nourishment in terms of a ‘sanctuary’, noting some of the ways that this ‘sense of sanctuary’ (p. 4) found expression – in the creation, for example, of a small meditation room on the ground floor of the UN headquarters, the Room of Quiet, for which Hammarskjöld wrote a short statement which reads:

This is a room devoted to peace
and those who are giving their
lives for peace. It is a room of quiet
where only thoughts should speak.

There is a real sense in which the room itself bears witness to something profoundly true about Hammarskjöld himself. As Rolf Edberg (the Swedish Ambassador to Norway) noted on the occasion of the posthumously awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1961, ‘No one who met [Hammarskjöld] could help noticing that he had a room of quiet within himself’. That sanctuary was nurtured and deepened and sustained by a life fed by the reading of Scripture, and by other spiritual writings by Meister Eckhart, Thomas à Kempis, Blaise Pascal, Martin Buber, the fourteenth mystic who penned The Cloud of Unknowing and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, as well as Buddhist and Taoist and Tibetan writings, and by a life given to prayer.

Although I’ve only just begun to wade into its waters, what is already apparent about Lipsey’s remarkable study is the way that he resists the temptation, taken up by so many biographers, to divorce the inner and the outer, the public and the private, worlds of his subject. Lipsey is committed to presenting Hammarskjöld as one in whom the spirituality evident in Markings both informs and is informed by his very public life and the policies and practices that he was determined to encourage on the international stage. Such a commitment is not only honest scholarship but it also recalls the great personal cost associated with the manner and vision of leadership that Hammarskjöld himself demonstrated, and it offers a challenge to those of us who are called to public roles (albeit less public than Hammarskjöld’s) and to attendance to (with the manner of integrity required of the subject) an honest and thinking faith. It also raises questions, at least for me, about how one might serve within an institution like ‘the church’ when its practices and theological convictions may be significantly at odds with one’s own, and do so with integrity, humility, patience and hope. And about those whom we serve but whose service takes other forms and is primarily outwith the boundaries of the churchly institution. How might one atmosphere inform the other, and how might one stay grounded and whole?

So Lipsey:

Many know something of spirituality in the sanctuary of a spiritual community or in their privacy. But what becomes of it, how does it serve and find paths forward when it must return to the world – when it has duties? Does it enrich a man or woman’s dedication to work? Does it strike deep roots in plain things or is it aloof? Does it touch life and allow itself to be touched only because there is no practical alternative? Does it learn from troubled circumstances and difficult people or does it long for the close of business so that it can go off on its own? Is it denatured by stress or does it somehow thrive? Does it make one more clear-sighted and strategic when strategy is needed – or hamper mobility by draping it in holy vestments, in slow ideas? (p. 4)

For Hammarskjöld, it seems, such questions expose and heighten the necessity of attendance to the sanctuary, to prayer. It is not as if prayer ‘works’, or as if prayer helps us to ‘make sense’ of life, or even of prayer itself. There is nothing utilitarian about true prayer. But in the mystery of prayer, the church (and here she is not alone) believes we are gathered up into God’s own movement of love and shadows; we are gathered up into home.

There is something palpable too about what I understand to be a deep christological mooring in Hammarskjöld’s unharnessed dedication to service in and of the world all the while being rooted in the mysteries and service of God, and of seeing each as being indispensible to the other. Something of this is borne witness to in a prayer that Hammarskjöld penned in 1954, the opening four lines of which (as a translator and interpreter of Markings, Bernhard Erling, has shown) are intensely trinitarian:

Thou who art over us,
Thou who art one of us,
Thou who art –
Also within us,
May all see Thee – in me also,
May I prepare the way for Thee,
May I thank Thee for all that shall fall to my lot,
May I also not forget the needs of others,
Keep me in Thy love
As Thou wouldest that all should be kept in mine.
May everything in this my being be directed to Thy glory
And may I never despair.
For I am under Thy hand,
And in Thee is all power and goodness.

Give me a pure heart – that I may see Thee,
A humble heart – that I may hear Thee,
A heart of love – that I may serve Thee,
A heart of faith – that I may abide in Thee. (Markings, 100)

Calvinism and Law: a conference

Calvinism LawThe International Reformed Theological Institute (ITRI), an affiliate member of the World Communion of Reformed Churches, is organising its tenth International Conference. It will take place between 2–7 July 2013 in the picturesque town of Sárospatak in Hungary. The theme will be Calvinism and Law – a relationship with a long history, and with no shortage of contemporary relevance. They have also issued a call for papers. These, and relevant questions about the conference, can be emailed to Albert Nijboer before April 20. More information is available here.

Please note too that a listing of other forthcoming theological conferences is available here.